Showing results for "william" in Literature & Fiction

A stunning collection of Just William stories, narrated by Martin Jarvis. These BBC radio readings of the adventures of William have come to be some of the most loved adaptations.

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a tragedy: every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals.

Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days.

The story of a man who became his bathroom.

A producer. A novelist. An actress. It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. While the world is reeling, our trio is involved in making a rackety Swingin' '60s British movie in sunny Brighton. All are leading secret lives. As the film is shot, with its usual drastic ups and downs, so does our trio's private, secret world begin to take over their public one. Pressures build inexorably - someone's going to crack. Or maybe they all will.

The person you are with is just like you: same background, same age, same interests. The perfect match. And it is an unmitigated disaster. Then, when and where you least expect it, you meet someone new. You seem to have nothing in common and yet, somehow, it feels totally right. Nick Hornby's brilliantly observed, tender but also brutally funny new novel gets to the heart of what it means to fall surprisingly and headlong in love with the best possible person - someone who is not just like you at all.

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque story that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucas Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The priests' black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey.

Kim is not your average member of Her Majesty's palace staff – but then he shouldn't be on the staff at all. He's in fact a Sun staff reporter who's wormed his way into Buckingham Palace to pick up every bit of dirt and gossip that he can lay his hands on. Along the way, Kim is faced with many surprising aspects of Palace life that even he didn't see coming. Based on the true story of the tabloid hack who became a Queen's footman, Palace Rogue is a charming, uplifting and utterly outrageous story of love and secrets – all of it set in the heart of one of the world's most famous houses.

One winter morning, Lorimer Black - young, good-looking, but with a somewhat troubled expression - goes to keep a perfectly routine business appointment and finds a hanged man. A bad start to the day by anyone's standards and an ominous portent. For Lorimer works in the only-slightly corrupt business of financial adjusting, and he is about to learn that it is much uglier - and even more crooked - than he ever imagined. Suddenly, he's being unfairly blamed for all kinds of irregularities. Next, his life is threatened.

This book is very silly. Actually, it contains two very silly books written by two very silly people. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll throw up. Contains the novellas Naked Brunch by William Pauley III and Naked Brunch by Zachary T. Owen.

Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity in Europe once rivaled Josephine Baker's. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona's strange, mystical world.

Meet our Eton Rogue: Seventeen-year-old Cary, now embarking on his extraordinary final year at Eton. Prince William has joined the school and the British tabloids are ravenous for headlines. Cary is the mole who's making thousands selling stories to the Sun newspaper—and while he's at it, he's secretly dating a housemaster's daughter.

Failed Shakespearean actor and would-be private detective William Power returns to Melbourne in this wry sequel that re-creates the tension and fear of wartime Australia. Bloodied and broken but somehow unbowed, he arrives in a town struggling under war-rationing and full of cocky American soldiers and lands squarely in the bosom of his childhood home in Carlton, now dominated by his sister-in-law, the odious Darlene.

TV’s first ecclesiastical comedy, All Gas and Gaiters was enjoyed by more than 10 million viewers on BBC One between 1966 and 1971. Written by husband-and-wife-team Pauline Devaney and Edwin Apps, it was so popular that a selection of scripts were revised and re-recorded for radio with the same star cast as the television series. Robertson Hare starred as the archdeacon of the fictional St Ogg’s Cathedral.

I went to a nice restaurant and ordered coffee; there was not any cream on the table. So, my wife pulled out her left breast and fixed me up. While she had it out, I took a few pulls on it. The manager came over and said I would have to leave. I reminded him that I knew the bartender where he drank beer; he then said, “Well, okay, we will make an exception this time." Man, it sure pays to know the right people. Sometimes bartenders seem like your best friend, but are they?

Oregon, 1851. Eli and Charlie Sisters, notorious professional killers, are on their way to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers have a series of unsettling experiences in the landscape of Gold Rush America. And they bicker a lot. Arriving in California, and discover that Warm has invented a magical formula, which could make all of them very rich. What happens next is utterly gripping, strange and sad....

It's 1942, and war is raging in Europe and in the Pacific. The Japanese army is on Australia's doorstep, and the small coastal Queensland town of Maryborough is on full war footing. What they are not prepared for is the arrival in the town of a troupe of incompetent actors whose unjustifiably self-confident leader, William Power, is determined to bring his daring production of Titus Andronicus to the barbarians of rural Australia. Unfortunately for the Power Players, the only gift William Power has is a capacity for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

An absolute delight of a debut novel by William Kuhn - author of Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books - Mrs Queen Takes the Train wittily imagines the kerfuffle that transpires when a bored Queen Elizabeth strolls out of the palace in search of a little fun, leaving behind a desperate team of courtiers who must find the missing Windsor before a national scandal erupts.

We live in a world where Netflix makes lavish dramas about the current royal family, whilst Prince Harry and Meghan continue to indulge us with tell-all interviews, articles, upcoming biographies and documentaries. So what if Oprah gave Kate and William the opportunity to tell their sides of the story and - against all the odds - they agreed?

Raunchy, risqué and rebellious, early Restoration comedies were a breath of fresh air for 17th century theatregoers. With Charles II restored to the throne in 1660, Oliver Cromwell's ban on stage performances was rescinded, and for the first time, women were invited to tread the boards as actresses. Playwrights developed a new style of social comedy, packed with amorous escapades, bawdy humour, wicked wit and sexual innuendo. This scintillating anthology showcases six leading lights of early Restoration drama.